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Ginger Cake
Two cupfuls molasses, one cupful butter, one and a half cupfuls sour milk, three and a half cupfuls flour, three eggs, two teaspoonfuls saleratus, one tablespoonful ginger, one tablespoonful cinnamon, one tablespoonful cloves.
An ingredient list with no method, which was normal in 1900 — the reader was assumed to know how a molasses cake goes together. The essentials are the leavening reaction and an oven low enough that the molasses does not scorch.
- Saleratus is baking sodaTwo teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, which is what reacts with the acid in the sour milk and the molasses to lift a batter this heavy. Sift or whisk it into the flour rather than dumping it into the liquid, or you will get bitter streaks.
- Sour milk means buttermilkSour milk means clabbered milk -- in a period kitchen, raw milk left to sour. Cultured buttermilk, 1 1/2 cups, is the usual modern stand-in rather than the same thing; milk soured with vinegar or lemon juice (about a tablespoon per cup) also works but is thinner.
- Molasses, not blackstrapTwo cups is a large proportion and dictates the whole flavour. Use ordinary unsulphured dark molasses; blackstrap is bitter and will dominate. Do not substitute in treacle syrups sold as "light" — the acidity is part of the leavening.
- Butter measureOne cupful is 8 oz, two US sticks. Cream it with the eggs and molasses; there is no sugar in the recipe, so all sweetness comes from the syrup.
- The spicing is deliberateThree level tablespoons of ground spice in one cake reads as an error, and it is heavy even by period standards, though strongly spiced molasses cakes are not unusual in nineteenth-century books. If a tablespoon of cloves seems severe, cut the cloves to a teaspoon and keep the ginger and cinnamon.
- Mixing orderCream butter, beat in eggs, then molasses, then alternate the flour-and-soda with the buttermilk. Bake as soon as it is combined — the soda begins working on contact with the acid.
- Pan and ovenThe batter fills a 9x13 inch pan or two 9-inch rounds. Bake at 325–350°F; molasses browns fast and a hotter oven will darken the crust before the centre sets. Reckon 35–45 minutes in the sheet pan, testing with a skewer.
- Yield and keepingAbout 16 squares. Like most molasses cakes it improves on the second day, wrapped; the crumb is moist and takes a lemon glaze or plain whipped cream.
Ginger cake of this kind sits at the point where gingerbread stopped being a stiff rolled biscuit and became a soft cake baked in a tin — a change tied to the spread of cheap chemical leavening in the nineteenth century. Saleratus, the potassium or sodium bicarbonate sold in grocers' packets from around the middle of the century, needed an acid partner, and molasses and sour milk supplied it, which is why the three appear together in recipe after recipe of the period. Molasses was also simply cheaper than refined sugar for most American households, and the heavy spicing here reflects both the strength of the syrup and the fact that ground ginger, cinnamon and cloves were, it is often said, among the more reliably stocked flavourings in a modest kitchen. The absence of any method is typical of cake chapters of this sort.</p>